Editorial: The Sweets of Rusticity ! (1907)

Editorial from the March 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent enquiry into the housing conditions of a small Hertfordshire village, known as Chipperfield has apparently been greatly agitating the Daily News and our pro-stock exchange, anti-gambling, nonconformist contemporary is of course mightily shocked at the revelations which have been made as to the unhappy state in which the villagers,—or some of them—exist so far as their lodgement is concerned. Most of the houses in which the agriculturist (the backbone of England’s greatness—see Tariff Reform Handbook) has his abode, have no sanitary conveniences ; many of them are in bad repair (in one case it is alleged that the happy tenant would go to bed on wet nights with an umbrella up !) and there is the usual scarcity with its inevitable overcrowding and comparatively high rents.

Excepting, perhaps, the somewhat novel feature of an umbrella protected bedroom, these are not unusual features of village life. Few villages indeed can boast of being free from all of them. They are just complementary to the private ownership of the land and housing accommodation, and there is no adequate and final remedy apart from the complete abolition of such private ownership and the extirpation of the capitalist and land-owning class. Conceivably the local authority could erect sanitary and well constructed houses even under present conditions, but as the obsession peculiar to local authorities is comprised in the necessity for showing a profit on any work of this character they may undertake, and as the great labour statesman at the head of the Local Government department has expressed his strong disapproval of any suggestion of increased indebtedness (and thereby earned the “well done good and faithful servant” of his capitalist paymasters) it is hardly conceivable, under present conditions, that the local authority would let any house erected by them at a rental within the possibilities of the agriculturist’s attenuated purse.

What generally happens is that houses are erected ostensibly for those in want of them, and let to those for whom they are not supposed to be intended, because these last only are in a position to pay the rental demanded. That is to say that in practice the Housing of the Working Classes Act is, like most other capitalist “working-class” Acts—a fraud.

The agriculturists of Chipperfield and elsewhere will therefore—unless it suggests itself as it very well may to the local authority or local landowner as good business to lose a little on the swings in order to get it back on the round-abouts—have to continue pigging together until such time as better housing accommodation is thrown to them as a sop to stay their conscious progress toward that Socialism which is the only sure cure for housing and other economic ills. Hopeless though it may seem, the agriculturist will have to organise himself in company with his town bred fellow for the overthrow of capitalist domination. There is no other way.